Ebooks Special Edition!
April, 2016
Ebooks are coming your way soon!
What's happening with ebooks in DPS?
- diversity and depth of content, especially availability of content in Spanish and a variety of languages for k-12, and audiobooks-text sets.
- barrier-free accessibility: can be used on any device without downloading apps
- digital annotation tools
- usability of the interface
- ability to transfer current ebook texts
- ability to transfer skills to public library use
The focus groups and committee unanimously chose OVERDRIVE ebooks as our primary provider. We also decided to purchase a small selection of texts in Follett Shelf due to their high-quality, interactive ebooks that will give students more rigorous digital literacy experiences.
When can we access titles?!
Our roll out schedule will be as follows:
August 2016: Elementary school
January 2017: Middle school
August 2017: High school
For our first year we decided to align with the district's early literacy plan by focusing our initial purchasing on elementary students. This includes continuing to purchase Tumblebooks.
What if my building wants to purchase ebooks?
How will I learn how to use these ebooks?
What do we hope to accomplish with an ebook collection?
To increase student access to engaging, high-quality, current, diverse, grade-level texts for independent reading in order to positively impact amount of time students spend reading and students’ ability to personalize their learning. Minutes spent reading is one of the biggest predictors of reading comprehension.
To increase student and teacher access to engaging, high-quality, current, diverse, grade-level texts that align with curriculum and student interests in order to positively impact amount of time students spend reading, access to the curriculum and students’ ability to personalize their learning.
To provide ebooks with annotation capabilities that which allow teachers to give students instruction and experiences in digital literacy skills that will positively impact digital reading comprehension, digital assessment skills and 21st Century college and workplace readiness.
Will print books no longer be relevant?
Reading online also places a higher cognitive demand on the reader, which results in lower comprehension. Students also often report being more easily distracted while reading online.
In addition, having print picture books is extremely important to early literacy. Mobile devices do not have screens large enough to match the picture book spreads of the print versions which allow for an adult to share the reading experience with a small child in a way that includes incorporating the small details of an illustration. Children under the age of 8 are concrete learners and benefit from many of the affordances of print books.
So why purchase ebooks? Access, access, access! Some neighboring school districts have experienced extremely high usage of ebooks, across all demographics. It removes barriers. I will also say that some of the best/worst moments of the student ebook testing was when students were trying to take the password cards home for the demo accounts. They wanted to keep reading! This was exciting. The worst part was having to tell them the demo accounts would close and they would have to wait for content. It did make us smile to hear some students say they were relieved they wouldn't have to worry about losing books anymore:)
We also know our students must take digital assessments and its critical we allow them to experience digital texts and annotation tools.
We also know that we have students at each grade level reading at a variety of grade levels in a number of different languages. Ebooks will allow us to leverage books across buildings, for example, our middle school students will be able to access content purchased for elementary school and high school (if it is developmentally appropriate). Finally, ebooks allow students to read books that are below grade level without any peers having to see the cover or the length/difficulty of the book.